A Place to Be Safe: RyersonSA’s Efforts in Inclusive Programming
From June 27–July 1, visit the #RyersonSA blog for Identity Intersections: Building a Proud Campus from the Whole Self, a series written by members of the Ryerson Community that explore the questions, “How do our sexual and gender identities intersect with other aspects of our identity and how does that affect building our ideal campus?”
You can sit with us
This year, Pride Toronto’s theme is “You can sit with us”, however, amidst the festivities for Toronto’s first Pride Month celebration, we receive a chilling reminder that the LGBT community still faces challenges sitting with the larger community.
What happened in Orlando this month is a sharp wakeup call to us all that the journey for the LGBTQ community towards inclusion is not over yet. We must continue to be vigilant and not be complacent. While we are called to action outside of the walls of Ryerson University, what are we called to do within these walls as Student Affairs professionals?
Ryerson exists just blocks away from Toronto’s gay village, we boast a commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion—but are we doing enough? When it comes to inclusion, the answer is often, no. Inclusion is that tricky part of this work that is hard to do because it requires buy-in from not only staff and faculty but also external stakeholders. Our goal is to create spaces where all of our students can feel safe and included and confident that their unique identities will not only be accepted but celebrated.
Working in the Career Centre, this is a difficult challenge to face, especially when dealing with our employer partners. How can we truly prepare students to be successful in the working world? Filling this need has not been easy, but we are making attempts. Voices of Experience is one of the ways we try to equip students—particularly those who identify with equity-seeking groups—with the appropriate tools to be successful in the workplace. Our panel focusing on the LGBTQ Community brought in political leaders, doctors, educators and diversity leaders who identified as LGBTQ. These people spoke to students about their challenges navigating the workforce and the things they did to overcome those challenges. Students were given the opportunity to network with these individuals and ask questions to gain better insight. We hope that through these interactions students will have learned how to navigate the employment world even in a small way, or at least understand what supports may be available to them.
While trying to equip students with useful tools to be successful, we also understand that we need to educate our employer partners about inclusion. Responding to this need, the Career Centre launched Investing in Inclusion this past June. This educational series is similar to Voices of Experience but the target audience is employers. We brought in businesses like IBM, PEPSICo, and Accenture to talk about their success supporting the LGBTQ community in the workplace. They spoke to a room full of businesses who were looking to do better. This was an opportunity for us to take that idea of inclusion and extend it beyond Ryerson University. We utilized this as an opportunity to tell our employer partners that inclusion of the LGBTQ community is a value that we as a University hold and in return they should hold. Investing in Inclusion is about helping our employer partners create spaces where our students can bring forward their full selves and all of their intersecting identities without fear.
The interesting part of this work is that it does not exist in isolation. Working towards inclusion for the LGBTQ community requires acknowledgement and acceptance of our intersecting identities. One of our participants at Investing in Inclusion talked about how her company hosted all of their employee resource groups only on Wednesdays. As a result, she felt she had to choose every week if she was black or queer or a woman. Failing to acknowledge that we have different facets to our identity is failing to meet the needs of our students. Our LGBTQ students tell us about these intersecting identities everyday, whether it be as a newcomer, a person of colour, as a person with a disability, or any number of other pieces of their identity.
We are only at the beginning of this conversation and call to action. It’s time for us as individuals and as a Ryerson community to take our commitment to equity and diversity and push it further into action. What are you doing to ensure the spaces you operate in are welcoming to all students? It’s not enough to say we’ve made a commitment to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion—we need to strive to view our spaces through the lenses of the community we are looking to serve. We need to disrupt our norms so we can all sit together.
Thank you for reading Identity Intersections: Building a Proud Campus from the Whole Self. We hope you’ve enjoyed these articles, but more importantly, that they’ve made you think critically about the intersecting identities we all carry. Our identities are fluid and complex, differing wildly from one person to the next, but we must embrace each, not as a whole unto itself, but as a piece that works with all the others to create the whole person. Only then can we hope to build a truly supportive campus of which we can be Proud.